Welcome to the New INFOdocket!

Welcome to the New INFOdocket!

INFOdocket has gotten a makeover, but that’s not all — today marks the beginning of a partnership with Library Journal.

As it has been in the past, INFOdocket will continue to be the place to find hand-picked news, reports, and links related to the hot library and publishing topics of the day. But now it will also serve as something of a first-pass site, providing context and coverage that will feed into the full reporting coming from the LJ News team. Look for more on this integration in the near future, and in places like the LJXpress and LJ Academic Newswire free weekly newsletters.

If you’re new to INFOdocket, here’s some background.

About Me and INFOdocket

I’m a librarian (MLIS, Wayne State), writer, speaker, and all around media-hound who’s been collecting, curating, and sharing the best of what the information industry has to offer for more than a decade.

I post many stories daily on a wide variety of topics, and over the course of a week, there’s something for just about everyone; my aim is to offer a healthy daily dose of information industry news and resources to supplement your other reading and news intake.

Given the various sources and topics I’m monitoring for INFOdocket, I’m also always on the lookout for trends and emerging technologies that have application to the library and information community.

As information professionals, librarians and those in related fields must read and think about posts on a variety of topics beyond those merely defined by their job function or career interests. I hope that the news and links offered here across a broad cross-section of fields may spark a new idea, or give readers fodder for new sites and resources to share with others. Likewise, information professionals ought to be up on the latest tools of potential use to their constituents, and a lot of what I try to do with INFOdocket is make that discovery process easier.

Most importantly, I love to see librarians and other information professionals stretch the bounds of their comfort zones and expand their interests into other, more distant but still connected areas that comprise our professional context.

How I postThere are no automated content creation processes or algorithms running here. Everything I post is posted for a reason. I sift through thousands of feeds and emails every day to select what eventually makes it onto INFOdocket.

Inclusion is my editorial decision: essentially, it’s me saying, “This is something I believe you should be interested in and know about. Agree or disagree, I believe this is stuff that should be seen.”

Some posts are of major importance—a monumental court case that stands to decide the fate of fair use—while some are more esoteric, but it’s all material that hits my bar for inclusion and relevance to you, your colleagues, and your patrons.

Even though I don’t editorialize about every link and clipping on the site, those who know me know I’m loaded with opinions, and I’ll be including more commentary when possible (e.g., see the recent comments I added to the Pew ebooks report or the Kindle privacy posts). As always, feel free to email me at gprice@mediasourceinc.com with any thoughts or suggestions.

On the resource picks
Often, free Internet resources go undiscovered and unused, which bothers me. It goes against what I hear from all sides, which is the necessity of exploiting every possible resource in this time of dwindling or eliminated budgets.

I’m a big proponent of what I call open web collection development, of building and maintaining local collections of open web resources for your local user base. I’m also adamant about making them easily and quickly available, versus resorting to Google and hoping for the best.

With all this in mind, I aim to collect useful resources that are of broad interest to as many librarians and collection developers as possible.

Meanwhile, in addition to creating INFOdocket, my colleague Shirl Kennedy and I are also the creators of Full Text Reports. There, Shirl curates a nonstop stream of fully accessible documents often posted shortly after their release from government sources, think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, academic departments, and others.

Our aim here is similar to that of INFOdocket—to help you discover, share, and perhaps add these reports to local collections and make them more easily findable and accessible to your users.

So, in the end, what is INFOdocket? The maximum amount of relevant content in the minimum amount of time.

Or, as I like to think of it in a way that may be familiar to most of you: “Save the time of the reader.”

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[…] articles about the information industry: Gary Price and INFOdocket have joined Library Journal! “As it has been in the past, INFOdocket will continue to be the place to find hand-picked new… Congrats to both Library Journal and […]